Foxes and Hedgehogs, Angels and Hacks: Oh, the humanity!

by John Holbo on March 29, 2014

Down the MOOC-hole, where I have been, I haven’t kept score in the Silver/Krugman kerfuffle. But, Plato-preoccupied as I was, I did make a false inference. I knew it was some fox-hedgehog thing. Silver was using Archilochus to frame what is wrong with standard opinion journalism. Perfect! I thought. Because I have read Plato’s Republic.

“Since, then, ‘opinion forcibly overcomes truth’ and ‘controls happiness,’ as the wise men say, I must surely turn entirely to it. I should create a facade of illusory virtue around me to deceive those who come near, but keep behind it the greedy and crafty fox of the wise Archilochus” (365b-c).

Socrates [Adeimantus] is being ironic [contrarian, for argument purposes], of course.

If Socrates were around today, he’d say opinion journalism is a false facade of virtue that overcomes truth. (I can hardly think of a better description of how Leon Wieseltier’s ideal goes wrong in practice. Wearing a heavy crown of virtue, so ostentatiously, doesn’t keep you upright. Everyone who wears one tends to bend to one side or the other, under the weight. Oh, the humanity!)

So of course I figured Silver was self-styling as a Socratic hedgehog, exposing greedy, crafty op-ed foxes. Now that I’ve caught up, by reading all this stuff, I realize the opposite is the case. He thinks he’s the fox, they are the hogs.

It’s not so important, of course, how we parse the fox-hedgehog metaphor. But it might clarify the debate. Silver’s charge against the op-ed hedgehogs (a.k.a. the foxes) is that they know one thing, i.e. their priors.

But that is really more a case of them wanting one thing, i.e. to be right. The charge is really more properly this: the superficially foxy op-ed writer can think many things about many things but wants only one thing, i.e. to ‘know’ he is basically right about everything. Thus, the foxiness of the op-ed writer – the flexibility that comes with not being a specialist but a generalist – is peeled back to reveal crypto-hedgehogism. What all op-ed foxes know how to do is deploy many opinions, in all directions, as spiny defenses of one impervious basic attitude: I am basically right about everything! There is a certain plausibility to that charge.

But it becomes hard to reconstruct the foxish alternative. Is Nate Silver saying he is superficially a hedgehog – i.e. a quant, a number guy? He knows only one thing: how to count? But underneath that superficial monotony, he’s a fox, i.e. he is prepared to think anything? But only if there are good reasons. He has transcended mere human limitations of cognitive bias and motivated reasoning?

That would be hubristic, to say the least.

If you tone it down a bit it makes more sense but it comes out a bit weird, as an advertisement: Silver could just be promising that his folks aren’t going to be total hacks. Being a competent numbers guy doesn’t make you a god, free of cognitive bias, but it does preserve you from being an hack, one might hope. But ‘read us, we are trying to be free of utter hackery, whereas other outlets tend to have at least some people on the payroll who are flagrant hacks’ is kind of a funny pitch.

I haven’t given Silver’s site a chance, because I literally haven’t visited it yet. I’ve been too busy. But it seems to me that critics are right that Silver’s sales pitch – ‘this is what we are doing that is distinctive!’ – has to be misleading. Sales pitches usually are.

And I’m not sure if he says it in that blog or an earlier one – the overriding emotion is disappointment – and that’s certainly how I feel.

Of course, 538 is new and can get better, etc.
Still, from Silver’s announcement of his move, the key seemed to be: could he find the right people to hire? Could he get some other people in who had some of his insight, but in other areas?

So far, it doesn’t feel like it.

The other thing, which seems to deflate “core fans” (e.g. Cowen, Smith, Krugman) is the choice of article lengths. I’m in two minds about it. I think the blog length posts don’t feel long enough to inspire much – but I know “people like me” aren’t a big enough market.

Still, you have to wonder how those short posts have enough distinctiveness to make it all work. And fear that the answer is bound to be “Freakonomics” style random contrarianism/controversialism… and then you wonder how different that is to the Daily Mail… and then you get disappointed…

Is it the case that most blogs make men better, and only one blog makes them worse, dear Meletus? Or does one blog make men better, and all the other blogs make men worse? Surely, only one blog (or just a few) make men better…

Much of the ire I’ve seen directed at 538 involves Pielke, Jr., a climate contrarian without credentials, which is neither here nor there.

The fox/hedgehog description is hard to apply to a bullshitter, who is making a pitch rather than developing a line of reasoning, who will be a fox to the extent that the same line works for most people, then a hedgehog when the customer proves resistant. It’s not a useful distinction for the typical columnist who decides where he stands by noting where everyone else lines up.

I’m old, I have a history. Many of my patents have more or less the same name, and my last designs are pretty similar to my first ones. So clearly I’m a fox. However, much of my work was strictly limited by economic and ergonomic constraints, and my efforts evolved in response to customer behavior, and I went from a work bench to the board room, and now I tell my siblings how to invest their money (index funds!). So, maybe a bit of a hedgehog, too?

Look at Krugman, who really knows his stuff when it comes to economics. You can take it to the bank. When he turns to politics and war and peace, he’s generally right there as well. So what is he? If he’s a fox, we need to find out the one thing he knows and print it out on a mountainside for future generations.

And even with the proper name in place, I don’t think it’s right to describe what’s going on at 365 as “Adeimantus is being ironic.” Instead, Adeimantus is arguing for a position that he does not believe, in order to invite a counter-argument. Adeimantus is imagining what someone else might say. It’s not his own view. But it’s not irony.

No worries, JH.
I’m just relieved that you don’t have a novel theory of the work, according to which Socrates “Logikos” Kint is an unreliable narrator who keeps dropping hints about the existence of a “Caesar” Söse Thrasymachus, the mastermind tyrant, only to have the final scene reveal that he spoke all of the parts and made it all up out of his own cephalus.

“It’s not so important, of course, how we parse the fox-hedgehog metaphor. But it might clarify the debate. Silver’s charge against the op-ed hedgehogs (a.k.a. the foxes) is that they know one thing, i.e. their priors.”

The thing is that in a situation with actual history the prior is supposed to be based on that history. For example, despite what people say, I think that the 2016 presidential election is the GOP’s to lose, because it’s very rare for the incumbent presidential party to get three terms in a row. Pundits, on the other had, don’t seem to even base their ‘priors’ on history, even when they’ve lived through it. They’ve just bullsh*tters, pure and simple. Their thought processes are probably more analogous to Pravda columnists than to anything else.

Barry wrote: For example, despite what people say, I think that the 2016 presidential election is the GOP’s to lose, because it’s very rare for the incumbent presidential party to get three terms in a row.

Oh God, that is so-o-o depressing. Here we are staring at the very real possibility of a GOP sweep of both houses of congress in 2014, and Barry comes up with a reason that is plausible at least at first sight that the GOP may also take the White House in 2016. Thanks for making my day.

from the OP:What all op-ed foxes know how to do is deploy many opinions, in all directions, as spiny defenses of one impervious basic attitude: I am basically right about everything! There is a certain plausibility to that charge.

I hope Holbo is at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek here. Because this is tautological: obviously the op-ed writer thinks she/he is right. That’s practically a definitional requirement of being a columnist. But there are degrees of dogmatism and degrees of open-mindedness, and it’s only close-minded people who approach the world w the attitude “my priors forever and damn all countervailing evidence of any sort on any subject whatsoever period!!” If that’s what is meant, then there is, contrary to the OP, rather little plausibility to the charge, since only a percentage (and not all that large a percentage) of all op-ed columnists are this jerky. YMMV, of course, and I acknowledge that churning out a column twice a week is prob. not the best way to cultivate humility.

This is only indirectly about Archilocus (or Berlin). It’s much more directly about Philip Tetlock, who evaluated the predictions of political scientists and political pundits, and found that none of them were very good, but that the “hedgehog” ones were even worse than the “foxes” at predicting future events.

LFC, I realized that soon after posting, but since it didn’t change my point, and since it was already my third comment, I decided to let it go. My confusion may have been the result of the video, which presents a variety of possible fox behaviors.

(Another data point: an old friend of mine hasn’t seen the video, but she knows of Siri’s responses. I may well be wrong that it’s a guy/girl thing.)

David Hobby, I was just noting that a lot of people don’t care for Pielke and didn’t think much of his inaugural essay. It was not a comment on Nate Silver or 538 as such. I really appreciate the quants, never more so than during the last U.S. presidential election, but even they couldn’t alleviate my anxiety. What worked was the suggestion to check Ladbrokes and the other London betting shops and hedge my fears by laying a wager on the undesired outcome. Checking the odds on offer proved very calming.

Silver applied relatively straightforward stats to a field dominated by the purest bullshit. The amazing part is the BSers got away with it for so long. We’ll see if this works on the broader BS problem in journalism.

Seems to be a little bit of a culture war coming up regarding something like “belief in math.”

My earliest recollection is Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Cat. The cat has only one trick, running up a tree, but one which reliably protects it from the pursuing hounds. The fox has many tricks, but, being not much different from a dog, has no comparable advantage.

Primates like us, and our nearest mammalian relatives, rodents and squirrels, are even more adept at the cat’s method of escape. However, the method is not recommended when pursued by a bear.

Nate Silver had the ultimate soft target in political analysis — as noted @26, this field was dominated by basically pure bullshit EVEN THOUGH there were also dozens to hundreds of high-quality polls that one could fairly easily do a meta-analysis of. So it was kind of like baseball pre-sabremetrics, in that you had a combination of commenters who were totally innumerate PLUS a large and publicly available statistical base that would support valid predictive conclusions. That’s like a fantasy. Other areas, like economics and business, are totally different — in fact, econ is pretty much the opposite situation, in that you have numerous very sophisticated and numerate commenters but you do not have data that really supports solid predictive conclusions. Certainly not a lot of easily available data that easily supports predictive conclusions beyond the obvious ones already being made by good beat reporters covering the latest employment reports. Adding value in a space like that is an extremely different proposition than adding value in politics.

Publishing a paid hack and wh*re is not balanced by publishing stuff by somebody who knows what they are talking about. The (cruel) joke that such things are commonly called ‘centrism’, which Nate allegedly didn’t like.

One thing that some seem not to get is that hiring Pielke is in and of itself a very bad sign. Honest people don’t hire people like him.

There were a lot of people with powerful megaphones who wanted a free shot at Nate Silver. Roger Pielke Jr. is hated (and that is not too strong a word) by about everyone working in climate science and policy because a) he has a power Roladex, b) a fondness for “seemingly” relevant cherries and c) a history of going nuclear on anyone he disagrees slightly with.

It was a perfect storm. Pielke went too far, the climate world provided the ammunition and the policy world shot it at 538

I know the actual referent of “the fox and the hedgehog” quote is uncertain; but can’t we extrapolate from Aesop’s “Fox and the Cat” what happened in the hedgehogian version?

The fox brags to the hedgehog of his many gifts and many feats, but when the hounds arrive, the hedgehog rolls into a ball and is safe, while the fox is caught and torn to pieces. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

In any case, the accomplishments of these particular people have come in large part from being hedgehogs– Krugman has shown over and over again that basic textbook econ does a better job predicting what happens in crises than complex mathematical formulations, and Nate Silver showed over and over again that just averaging polls is much better than coming up with novelistic narratives about campaign strategy and candidate prowess.
On the questions that the maxim is applied to, it’s almost always better to be a hedgehog. Don’t start stupid wars. Don’t torture people. If you put hundreds of billions of tons of pollutants into the air, something bad will probably happen. Our reliable understandings of the world are few and far between, and if you try to be too clever, the hounds will be on you before you know it.